Grace’s Famous Island Soda – Kola Champagne

Toronto’s going through a minor heat wave right now, so a nice, cold soda sounded perfect for reviewing in the abnormally hot weather.

To be absolutely honest, I had no idea what “Kola Champagne” means as a flavour. Even after drinking some of the soda, I STILL have no idea what it means by Kola Champagne!

I’m sure there’s some sort of story behind it, but as an everyday Canadian shopper, I would expect the soda to taste like cola and champagne…

For each bottle, there’s about 37g of carbohydrates that are all simple sugars! It has about the same amount of sugar as a single 355mL can of Coca-Cola, but it also has almost half the amount of sodium (25mg in this Island Soda and 45mg in Coca-Cola).

There really isn’t much use to look at the ingredient deck in most sodas since they’re all about the same thing.

The different flavour profiles are usually made by secret recipes of both natural and artificial ingredients but there’s some CFIA labelling regulations that allows a manufacturer to group a bunch of ingredients together as long as they make up less than a certain amount within the formula.

Besides, do you really want to know what sort of artificial ingredients there are in a soda?

Didn’t think so.

I do love how this brand comes with a little fun. Not to mention, the caps are twist off!

Now, what could be under the cap?

It says, “Big tree fall down, goat bite de leaf.”

Um. Okay.

I’m not very up to date with island lingo, but I’m guessing it means that if you get too big and successful and you fall down, there’s always someone there to try and take away part of your success?

At least it’s still keeping the island theme!

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Appearance – 4.5/5

As a competitor against Jones Soda, the classic glass soda bottle and metal cap was a good choice since it’s so much more retro and traditional than the cap designed for plastic bottles that Jones uses. The label was perfectly sealed onto the bottle and didn’t wrinkle or flap off after a few minutes in the warm weather, either.

The soda itself was bright, BRIGHT orange with lots of big fizz bubbles after you pour it out of the bottle.

The only thing about its appearance is that the name of the soda still makes no sense to me! But, that’s more of a marketing thing than about the actual food.

Aroma – 4/5

After I opened it up, the distinctive scent of cream soda hits my nose. Cream soda? Really? How is that Kola?

It smelled quite pleasant, though. It wasn’t too strong, but it did have enough strength to keep that aroma throughout the whole beverage. As I kept smelling it, I could pick up a faint alcoholic scent that reminded me a bit of a wine spritzer.

Taste – 3.5/5

The soda tastes sweet and very much like rich cream soda but with a faint citric taste, so it was closer to being like a pina colada.

But, I could only taste was the cream soda flavour after a while. The different flavours weren’t balanced very well overall.

Texture – 4/5

The only thing I can comment about texture in soda is its fizziness/effervescence (it’s a word, I swear!), its viscosity (how thick it is) and if it’s sticky or not.

Good thing is that it’s plenty fizzy but not so much that it starts to attack your tongue and it’s not sticky or thick at all. But, I found it a TINY bit too thin since all the flavours disappeared before it reached my throat.

Overall – 16/20

At $1.00, this gourmet soda is tasty, trendy and extremely affordable. The only negative points about this soda are the confusing flavour name and the prominent cream soda flavours. If the name was changed to something more relevant, the soda would have ranked higher.

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UPDATE: I found out that Kola Champagne is their name for Cream Soda. It all makes sense now!

B.elle